She had tried to defend herself, of course. ‘That was not—I was not—’she had begun, but typically Marcus had refused to allow her to continue. ‘Oh, come off it, Lucy,’ he’d said harshly, ‘we all know what happened. After all, the photographs were plastered all over the celebrity gossip rags. You, minus bikini top, draped all over Blayne, saying that you were up for a good time and looking for everything that went with that.’
‘Goodness,’ she had retaliated, in a brittle voice, ‘you’ve actually remembered the caption word for word. Did you have to practise repeating it for very long to do that, Marcus?’
Of course she had regretted the idiotic quote recorded in the magazine. But when you were jet lagged, and you’d packed in such a rush that you’d omitted to pack matching bikini tops and bottoms, and you got caught out and papped by some prowling paparazzi with nothing better to do and no one better to photograph, you naturally did your best to make a joke of your plight—especially when those same paparazzi could sometimes be so important to the success of your business.
Not all celebrities, no matter what they might choose to say in public, genuinely wanted to avoid those camera lenses. Many actively sought out the events and parties where they would be spotted and photographed. Thus, Lucy had felt she could not afford to offend the guy who had snapped her, no matter what her own personal feelings.
If he’d seen her twenty-four hours later, then the photograph he would have taken would have been a very different one. Then, after a decent night’s sleep and with the loan of a bikini from Jules, she would probably have been in control enough to tell him truthfully that she was simply taking a much-needed holiday from the mounting stress of running a successful business.
Unfortunately the photographer had taken it into his head that her life was far more interesting than it actually was, and from then on neither he nor his camera had been very far from her side.
Nick had revelled in the attention. At the time she had taken that as a sign that, unlike the other men she had dated, he would be able to cope with her work and its effect on their personal life. She hadn’t realised that for Nick everything had its price—including photographs of them together, if not actually having sex in a variety of exotic locations then as close to it as was possible, given that she was wearing bikini bottoms and he was wearing swimming shorts.
She had had no idea that she was being set up with a view to them being taken until it was too late and they had been published. And by then she and Nick were married—
Naturally in public she’d had to shrug off her real feelings and pretend that she welcomed her new image as a randy, anything-goes, up-for-it and eager for sex party girl, only too delighted to let the whole world see how much she wanted her new husband. Even if by then that same new husband had been privately calling her frigid and useless in bed, and spending more nights out of their marriage bed than he was spending in it with her.
She looked at her watch a little bit anxiously. She had spent rather longer with her solicitor than she had expected, and she was due to put in an appearance at her great-aunt Alice’s ninetieth birthday party this afternoon.
Great-Aunt Alice lived in Knightsbridge, in a huge old-fashioned apartment that was always freezing cold because, despite her wealth, she refused to have the central heating on.
No one in the family ever wanted to visit her in winter, and even in summer the wise visited equipped with extra layers in the form of cardigans, pashminas and the like, to ward off the icy blasts which Great-Aunt Alice insisted were necessary for good health and were the reason she was still hale and hearty at ninety.
‘Balls,’ Lucy’s younger cousin Johnny had always claimed. ‘The reason she’s still alive is because she’s too bloody mean to die. God knows, I could do with my share of her millions.’
‘What makes you think you’ll get a share?’ Lucy’s brother Piers had asked wryly.
‘I’m bound to,’ Johnny had replied smugly. ‘I’m her favourite.’
‘Yah? Well, you certainly work hard enough at it,’ Piers had mocked him.
Nineteen-year-old Johnny, with his slightly louche lifestyle, permanent lack of money and winning ways, had a reputation within the family of being someone who was constantly wheeling and dealing. Lucy suspected that Marcus probably disapproved of Johnny almost as much as he did her.
Marcus! But she didn’t disapprove of him, did she? And that was the cause of, if not all, then surely most of the problems in her life. It had, after all, been to escape from loving Marcus and the knowledge that that love would never be returned that she had thrown herself into Nick’s arms. And it was because she still loved Marcus now, despite all her attempts to stop doing so, that she treated him with hostility and resentment. That was her shield, her only protection against the potential humiliation of Marcus—or anyone else—ever discovering how she felt about him.
CHAPTER TWO
‘GOODNESS. It’s actually warm in here!’ Lucy removed the cashmere wrap she had pulled on over her delicate silk chiffon dress the moment she walked into Great-Aunt Alice’s hallway.
‘Yes, I bribed Johnson to put the heat on.’ Her brother Piers grinned.
‘You might have told me that before,’ Lucy grumbled affectionately, as she fanned herself with her hand to cool down her flushed face. ‘How warm did you tell him to make it? It’s like a sauna in here. The flowers I’ve bought Great-Aunt Alice will have wilted before she gets them.’
‘Never mind your flowers—what about my chocolates?’ Piers told her ruefully.
‘Piers thought Johnson was probably still working in Fahrenheit,’ Lucy’s father chipped in. ‘So he told him to set the temperature gauge at sixty-eight. None of us realised what had happened until Johnson came back and said that the gauge only went to forty.’
Lucy joined in the good-natured laughter at her brother’s expense, and then suddenly froze as the door opened and Marcus walked in.
Was it her imagination or was there really a small, sharp silence—as though not just she but everyone else was aware of just how formidable and commanding Marcus was?
It wasn’t only that he was tall—just nicely over six foot—or even that he was sexily broad-shouldered and taut-muscled. It wasn’t even that combination of thick dark hair and striking ice-grey eyes which could sometimes burn almost green.
So what was it about him that made not just her own sex but men as well turn and look towards him? Turn and look up to him, Lucy amended.
Could it have something to do with the fact that he ran the merchant bank which had been in his family for so many generations? Because of that he was in a position of great trust, responsible not just for the present and future of his clients, but in many cases for the secrets of their ancestors as well.
But even if one took away all of that—even if he had walked in as a stranger off the street—women would still have turned their heads to look at him and would have gone on looking, Lucy acknowledged. Because Marcus was sexy. In fact, Marcus was very sexy. Her heart attempted to do a high dive inside her chest, then realised it was attempting the impossible and ended up crashing sickeningly to its floor. She gulped at the glass of champagne Piers had handed to her as much for something to do—some reason not to have to look at Marcus—as for Dutch courage.
He was wearing one of his customary hand-made plain dark suits, a typical banker’s white shirt with a blue stripe, and a red tie.
She took another gulp of her champagne.
‘Want another?’ Piers asked her.
Lucy shook her head. She wasn’t much of a drinker anyway, and her work meant that it was essential she kept a clear head in social situations, so she had quickly learned to simply take a small sip from her glass and then abandon it discreetly somewhere. The up side of this was that she always had a clear head, but the down side was that her body was simply not up to dealing with anything more than one small glass of anything alcoholic. But right now the numbing effect of a couple of glasses of champagne w
as probably just what she needed to help her cope with Marcus’s presence, intimidatingly up close, if not exactly as personal as her foolish heart craved.
‘Oh, good. Marcus has made it after all,’ Lucy heard her mother exclaiming to Lucy’s great-uncle in a pleased voice. ‘Charles, do go over and ask him to join us.’
‘Goodness, it is hot,’ Lucy said wildly. ‘I think I’d better go and get these poor flowers into some water.’
Her heart was thumping its familiar message to her as she made her escape, champagne glass in hand, heading for the rambling patchwork of corridors and small rooms to the rear of the huge apartment which her great-aunt still referred to as the servants’ quarters.
How on earth did Johnson and Mrs Johnson, aided only by a daily, manage to cope with looking after somewhere this size? Lucy wondered sympathetically as she hurried down one of the corridors and into the ‘flower room’. A row of vases had already been assembled on the worktop, ready filled with water, and Lucy unwrapped her own offering and busied herself placing the flowers stem by stem into water.
Was she really so afraid of seeing Marcus? Her hands trembled. Did she really need to ask herself that question? How old was she? Twenty-nine. And how long had it been since she had come down from university and looked at Marcus across the width of his desk and known…?
Tears suddenly blurred her vision.